Winners and Losers of the Pierre-Luc Dubois to the Kings Trade
Pierre-Luc Dubois is less than a week past his 25th birthday.
Yet he's already logged more than 400 games in the NHL and scored more than 100 goals.
And come the fall, he'll already be suiting up for a third team in a third time zone.
The Quebec-born center picked third overall at the 2016 draft was the prized piece in a multi-player deal that went down a day before the 2023 player-selection party, sending him to the Los Angeles Kings in exchange for three players and a second-round pick in 2024.
The Winnipeg Jets, for whom Dubois had played since coming off from the Columbus Blue Jackets in January 2021, inked the 6'4", 214-pounder to an eight-year, $68 million contract extension before the trade was finalized. Dubois was a year away from unrestricted free agency and had suggested he'd had no interest in signing a long-term deal with the Jets, but their signing him allowed one more year on the pact than he'd have gotten as a free agent,
In exchange for Dubois, Winnipeg gets forwards Alex Iafallo, Rasmus Kupari, and Gabriel Vilardi, in addition to the pick that Los Angeles had initially acquired from Montréal.
The B/R hockey team took a look at the deal and its impact on the teams involved as well as other parties, then compiled a list of the trade's most definitive winners and losers. Take a look at what we came up with and drop a thought of your own in the comments.
Winner: Pierre-Luc Dubois
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Regardless of how it's spun, no one made out better than Dubois himself.
He didn't want to stay in Winnipeg beyond this season, but rather than waiting until the trade deadline or next offseason to get his walking papers, he not only found an escape hatch to a warmer climate—but found it stuffed full of money, too.
The Jets were headed toward an offseason of upheaval with Dubois and several others heading toward their contract years, and after an uneven regular season was followed by a quick playoff exit the future on the ice beyond 2022-23 didn't look so promising either.
But with the trade to Los Angeles, he joins a team that won 47 games last season and has gotten within an eyelash of eliminating the Edmonton Oilers in consecutive first-round playoff series. The Kings have averaged just 2.85 goals across 13 games in those two matchups, however, and Dubois should provide another layer of offensive depth they've been missing.
He had 55 goals and 123 points across two full seasons in a city where he wasn't particularly happy, so it's no stretch to suggest those numbers will spike amid the sun and glamour.
Loser: The Future L.A. Kings
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Make no mistake, out of all the players involved in the deal the Kings got the one with the best NHL track record. And, at age 25, there's no reason to believe Dubois won't flourish.
But they did give away some things, too.
Iafallo was a reliable contributor, a playoff veteran and a popular guy with both his teammates and coach Todd MacLellan. Vilardi was a No. 11 overall pick who put up his best numbers in what was his healthiest season.
So while they might have gained something when it comes to top-end talent, it's hard to argue that the trade cost them some valuable depth pieces. And while Dubois has indeed scored 20 goals four times in six seasons, he's not nearly the needle-mover that a guy traded under similar circumstances last summer, Matthew Tkachuk, has been.
And lest anyone forget, though the Kings have slightly better than $4.5 million in cap room to work with this offseason, they still look at the roster and see 31-year-old journeyman Pheonix Copley as the only goaltender under contract for next season.
Unless that issue is addressed, acquiring Dubois may not matter quite so much.
Winner: Winnipeg Jets
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Kevin Cheveldayoff gets full marks for this one.
Being general manager of the Jets isn't exactly an easy job these days given the issues already cited, so the fact that he got any return for a disgruntled player who was 12 months from leaving for nothing is good. And getting a return on the level of the one he pried away from the Kings begins to approach competitive larceny.
At 6'2" and 200 pounds, Kupari has evolved into an effective physical presence and a reliable face-off man for the Kings. But the meat of the deal comes from Vilardi and Iafallo, two young and talented defensive forwards.
Vilardi, in just 63 games, scored a career-high 23 goals, including five on the power play. He's a restricted free agent after playing last season on an $825,000 salary and is due a slight salary bump, so keeping him in the fold and maximizing his output for the long term will be a priority for Cheveldayoff going forward.
Iafallo is older than the other two components of the trade at 29, but is a solid depth winger that will provide the Jets a proven penalty killer.
Regardless, though, in the game of trying to get something for nothing, the Jets were winners.
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Loser: The Pacific Division
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OK, though the deal may not help the Kings so much down the road, it's a nice jolt for them going into 2023-24 and not such good news for the rest of the Pacific Division.
It won't matter much to the Vegas Golden Knights, of course, given the prolonged afterglow they'll be experiencing following the franchise's first Stanley Cup earlier this month.
But elsewhere in the division, it's not quite so positive.
The Calgary Flames were bounced from the 2022 playoffs by their most hated rivals, missed the tournament entirely this spring, and now seem on the verge of implosion if even some reports that a number of players entering contract years won't stick around are true.
The Edmonton Oilers have lost two consecutive playoff series to the teams that went on to win the Cup and generational superstar Connor McDavid walked away with another hardware haul from the NHL Awards, but unless they get the sort of sturdy defense and goaltending they're paying Darnell Nurse and Jack Campbell for, it won't matter.
And though the Seattle Kraken were a nice surprise this season while going from missing the playoffs to reaching the second round, they've still been quiet as draft night approaches and could get even further away from the bulked-up Kings than last year's four-point gap.
It'll be incumbent on those teams to pull the trigger on something to impact their rosters on the level that Los Angeles did, or they risk watching Dubois and Co climb past them in the race to evict Vegas from both the division and league penthouses.
Winner: Trade Junkies
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The season is great and the playoffs are incredible.
But there is a segment of hockey fans out there that looks just as eagerly toward draft night and the trade deadline as they do the initial face-off or the final victory lap.
We'll call them Trade Junkies.
And there's no doubt they've been sated this week.
The Dubois trade was the latest in a series of transactional dominoes to fall before the draft, following deals that sent Taylor Hall from Boston to Chicago, Kevin Hayes from Philadelphia to St. Louis, and Dubois from the Jets to the Kings.
The good news? There will be others.
Names like Erik Karlsson, Alex DeBrincat, Elias Lindholm and Connor Hellebuyck are providing high-profile grist for the rumor mill as we speak, and it's hardly hyperbolic to suggest one or all of them will be changing addresses before too long.
Sure, it's not Christmas. But for those laying in wait for the next big name to move, it's still a pretty wonderful time of the year.
Loser: Montreal Canadiens
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It made all the sense in the world.
A Quebec-born player disgruntled in Canada's heartland and on the trading block had a perfect destination waiting for him: Montréal.
The NHL's winningest all-time franchise is in the midst of a rebuild and is stockpiling young talent, so landing a local hero on Dubois' level would have been ideal.
But it didn't happen.
Though GM Kent Hughes was in the running to make the deal with the Jets, reports suggest that he was reticent to include a young player like Kirby Dach in the transaction and preferred to offer longer-term prospects and draft capital, including some of the 11 picks the team has in this week's draft.
But in the end, Winnipeg was more interested in acquiring players who could contribute immediately. Thus, Dubois became a King and not a Canadien.
Montreal has been active and did send two picks and a prospect to Colorado on Tuesday in exchange for 23-year-old center Alex Newhook, who was a first-round pick in 2019 and has 27 goals in 159 NHL games.
But he's not the proven commodity that Dubois is and his Newfoundland birth certificate doesn't have quite the same hook as one belonging to a kid born exactly an hour from the Canadiens' home at the Bell Centre.
Sacré bleu, blanc et rouge!
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